People can get rhinoplasty, or chop their dicks off, or hell, if they want to, chop their legs off. The problem from my perspective comes in when they want official recognition and for laws to legitimize their illness. If someone is denying an objectively provable fact, we have no right to force others to accept that. If we have to humor a mentally ill man to keep him from suicide by "playing along" that he is really Ronald Reagan and President of the US, the absurdity of it becomes apparent. I may choose to humor a man like Bradley Manning who is pretending to be a woman named Chelsea, but I should have no legal obligation to do so.

The entire problem with the so-called "transgender" movement is that it is trying to equate itself with the homosexual movement (a gross misstatement of reality) and that it is a civil rights, rather than a mental health, issue.

However, as more time goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer that it IS a mental health issue, not a civil rights issue (except to the extent that it raises questions about how we deal with mental illness generally in the US, something that needs review as we tilted from one extreme - committing people in prison-like institutions - to the other extreme - not holding anyone for more than 72 hours unless they present a clear danger to themselves and others - with little thought as to the consequences).

As a result, it's important to point out, again and again, that it is a mental health issue, that professionals acting without a political agenda should make decisions, and that we should not make laws treating the issue as a new civil rights matter.